


Love Interruption

by lightningwaltz



Category: Death Note
Genre: Gen, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-10
Updated: 2013-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-24 08:53:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/632626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningwaltz/pseuds/lightningwaltz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because sometimes you just want to write a rule 63 AU where Light and L are both women.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> What it says in the summary, haha.
> 
> This is a multi-chapter Rule 63 AU where Light and L are both women. I wanted to try this out because I've been rewatching Death Note recently, and 'public perception' is such a strong theme in the series. (Case in point: Light probably gets away with things for so long because he seems like such an ideal young man. While L is an effective detective because he has such strong control over who gets to know his identity) And I just thought it could be interesting to play around with how gender might- or might not!- change things for characters. 
> 
> Also I'm setting this in 2013 instead of the early 2000s because I want to play around with how the rise of social media might- or might not!- change the plot.

As far as Light Yagami was concerned, it all boiled down to one basic precept. _Nothing ever changed._

Her weekly routine carried on in lockstep rotation. The seasons circled around with inexorable uniformity. Human sadism was as constant as the earth’s orbit. And if people were infinitely creative with their cruelties, well, the end result was always the same; death and trauma, all borne from cowards and shirkers shielding their eyes from the truth. 

Light might have been angry about it. She had been once, long ago, when society still saw her as a child. Nowadays this was a train of thought largely sequestered to the silent hours before her alarm went off. 

Light’s entire life centered on the rotation of the clock. The ticking of the minutes, and the steady loop of the hour hand. The school bell rang- at the same time it did every day- and Light heard her classmates whispering and gossiping. Today, it would seem that some girl from another school had sent her boyfriend nude pictures, and the guy had rewarded her trust by plastering them all over the internet. Light listened to this, as she gathered her things, and she allowed her disdain was like the purest kind of fuel. How disgusting that men would leer over a woman’s degradation, and how disgusting that Light’s female classmates would be so complacent about it.

Well, no. She looked closer and saw a certain sentiment written all over their faces. _I’m so glad that wasn’t me. If I just act good that could never happen to me… Right?_ How very human, and how very infuriating. 

_Ugh, why do people turn their backs on their own?_

Unable to take it anymore, she tilted her head to look out the window so stare into the endless sky.

That’s when she saw the book. 

Light thought it dropped to the earth like a bird honing in on its dinner. 

*****

_She had experience with similar sights. In one of her earliest memories, she had witnessed a hawk pluck a squirrel clean from the ground. At the time, Light had yelped, even cried a bit, and her mother had comforted her. Commended her for being such a sensitive, compassionate little girl._

_Light did not speak the truth in her heart. It wasn’t the hawk’s actions that shocked her. Even then she had had no sentimental illusions about the facts of predators. And prey. This harsh display drove home the suddenness of death. One instant she could be breathing, and the next she could be a corpse. All due to decisions of forces outside her control._

_Knowledge was the greatest shield of all, and ignorance the greatest weakness._

*

A typical child might come to the conclusion that one should wrest every last drop of joy out of a fleeting existence. Light was not exactly ordinary, however. She spat on the idea of ordinariness, she trampled on it, denied it. It was not for her, never for her. 

Thus, Light’s failed to transform into a philosopher on the subject of happiness.

But here she had fallen into a loop once again, and the book’s appearance seemed to complete something started long ago. While the rest of her classmates chattered about what they would do this evening (wouldn’t it be exactly like any other night?) Light sought out the mysterious object lying on the grass. When she picked it up it felt solid and corporeal. Like it belonged in her hands. A glance up at the sky revealed no planes or parachutes. 

_Where did this even come from?_

She read the title on the cover, flipped through its inscriptions, and made a sound suspiciously like a snort. 

_A book that could cause death? How implausible._

Light couldn’t bear to leave it, however. She had seen it first, after all. 

*****

“Hi, Light!” Sayu’s voice was bright and piercing. When she had been a baby, her younger sister’s first words had issued forth as singsong musings and Light had been so delighted to find that a genuine _person_ lurked inside this once voiceless human. Sayu had grown up, of course, and her words had evolved into sentences, but she still treated the world like her stage. “Welcome home to the best sister, and best student of all time.” 

Light could never decide if her sister was mocking or sincere, but she suspected the latter. Sayu didn’t seem to have a mean bone in her body. 

And her sister was currently fixated on the television. Her hands were clenched below her chin, and she perched on the edge of the couch. Light decided to sit next to her Sayu, if only to force back her the ungodly uproar in her mind. 

_…test the book test the book test the book test the book…_

On the screen, a couple was kissing. The music swelled. Light’s sister sighed.

“Didn’t that one character have amnesia?” Light examined her nails, noting with displeasure that the red paint was chipped in places. 

Sayu rolled her eyes. “Yes. _Three weeks ago._.” 

_…test the book you know you want to know…_

“Not anymore?” 

“Nope!” Her sister’s smile was downright joyous. “And now they’ve confessed their love. I really wish I had a boyfriend...” 

Light shook her head. “No you don’t. Dating is pretty boring.” 

Sayu muted the television (the show had gone to commercials) and crossed her arms. “Easy for you to say. You’ve already gotten to go on dates.”

“Yes,” Light said, not sure why she was pressing this point, “and for the most part guys don’t get much more interesting outside the classroom.”

“Well, there’s your problem.” Sayu lightly punched Light in the arm. “Go on dates with people you actually like. Maybe then they’ll seem interesting.” 

“Good advice.” Light rises to her feet and hoists her book bag back over her shoulder. “You should start a newspaper column.” 

Sayu’s giggling followed Light up the stairs. The mysterious book remained stashed away for the rest of the evening. 

*****

She denied her curiosity again and again, until the following morning shattered it like a hammer against glass. During the bus ride to school, Light scrolled through her twitter feed and saw that a robber was holding a nearby bank hostage. The man had already murdered two innocent people, and likely would kill again before the day was done. 

While she pondered her move, the bus made two stops, its doors screeching open and shut. Pedestrians flooded in and out of the vehicle, bumping against Light’s knees, but she hardly felt them at all. Light pulled out the death note and ran her fingers over the letters on its cover.

_This man has forfeited his life._

Once decided, this conclusion seemed blindingly obvious.

She took out a pen, and wrote down the criminal’s name. It was almost too easy. Light glanced down at the way simple black ink sliced across plain white paper. Somewhere in the world- somewhere quite nearby, in fact- this name encompassed a man’s entire identity.

Having made the leap, Light proceeded to close the book and return it to her bag. She sat up, straight as a tower, and refreshed her phone’s browser. Within moments several sources announced a twist in the tale; the criminal had died, and his hostages were now free. 

Light clutched her phone to her collarbone-just above her heart- and closed her eyes. It seemed like the kind of moment in which one should pray, but instead she could only give herself over to a nauseating kind of elation.

*****

When Light came back home, a shinigami was waiting for her.


	2. Chapter 2

Light was pleased that she was strong enough to adjust to the constant presence of a death god. It helped that she growing accustomed to meting out judgment from far away. She was certain the two concepts walked side by side. If a person accepted one aspect of the divine- in all its bloody terror and glory- than they were more likely to accept all of its various permutations. 

And apparently one of its permutations was a shinigami sitting on her bed, munching on a bright red apple, and muttering in delight.

Ryuk _claimed_ that her discovery of the death note was pure happenstance. It had no meaning beyond whim. But Light’s tolerance could not stretch far enough to accept this. He couldn’t know every pattern of fate, and he couldn’t know the universe’s true intent. 

“Hey, Light.” When the shinigami spoke, his voice was somewhere between a death rattle and the gears of a rusty machine. Light found it soothing. “You sure have written a lot of names in there. Not that I mind.”

Light combed her fingers through her hair, and finished with someone’s name. Just like that, someone’s life ended. She searched her soul for pity and found none.

“There are seven billion people in the world, Ryuk.” She turned in her chair to look up at her shinigami. (And she did think of him as _hers_ , even though she knew it was foolishness. Ryuk was hers only in the sense that they both belonged to this conspiracy of two.) “And that allows for many kinds of crime. Our courts are largely inconsistent and corrupt, you see. You’ve done a good service to the human race by entrusting this book to me.” 

The words spilled out of her so easily.

“Heh. Didn’t mean to.” Ryuk swallowed the core completely, and Light thought of snakes that could eat animals whole.

She should have been scared, but instead she smiled. It was easy to smile at Ryuk; it was nothing like the looks she gave her classmates, nothing like the grins that had the sting of biting into a lemon. 

“Do you have trials in the shinigami realm?”

“Nah, not really. We just play cards all the time.” Ryuk leaned closer. “You can see why I left.” 

_Ah, we are alike more than I had considered._ “Also I think roughly the same number of humans must die every day, right?”

“Hm? Makes sense.” It felt a bit like Ryuk was laughing at her. 

That wouldn’t do. It was important to make him _understand._ If Light was ever frustrated by her death note, the problem lay in the lack of anything that tied her to the deed. While that would help her evade blame, it also meant she had to go bereft of accolades. Sometimes the parents of murder victims would blog or tweet about how the killer had finally died in jail, but that was the closest thing to gratitude that Light ever received.

(She kept those pages bookmarked in a nondescript folder, and she pored over them night after night.)

“I ask about that because I was hoping that, by killing criminals, it meant that were taking the place of people who might otherwise pass away on a given day.” Light stared at Ryuk without shying away.

“Nah, I don’t think it works that way. You’re just making people die who otherwise wouldn’t.”

Light blinked. “Oh well. It was a nice thought, wasn’t it?”

*****

For every hour L spent actively engaged on a case, there were probably ten hours spent like this; L sprawled out on her back, absentmindedly listening to podcasts or radio stations (one absorbed a great deal of information this way), and allowing her computer to slip into sleep mode. Its battery indicator light pulsed like the slow facsimile of a heartbeat.

A screeching noise heralded an incoming message from Watari, and at once L pulled herself into a crouching seated position. 

“Yes, what is it?” 

“There have been more prisoner deaths, L.” 

She rested her teeth against her thumbnail. She rarely chewed it off, but somehow it was comforting to know she could. “Alright, send the details to me.” 

“Understood.” Watari’s symbol disappeared from the computer as quickly as it appeared. 

Here was another thing about successful investigative work; much of it was a monotonous waiting game. For weeks, now, L had been creating a chart dedicated to the sudden epidemic of prisoner murders. Times of death, causes of death, nature of their crimes. At first she had done it for Watari’s sake. He had been far more curious about it than L, while she had chalked up the first few incidents to stressful living conditions in jails. However, the deaths had piled up, the similarities had piled up, and L .... L had always lived in a quantitative world. 

L leaned closer, and squinted at her data. When it depicted in this fashion, she felt confident about the age and nationality of the perpetrator. The motive was even simpler to guess. 

Criminal profiling remained an immensely useful art.

In the end, only one question remained, but it was a significant one. How was this person- dubbed Kira by the media- committing these murders? The question was tossed around everywhere from conspiracy internet forums to hushed conversations in the halls of law enforcement, but no one had answers. 

L stared up at the ceiling, her mind churning with unsettling scenarios. Case in point: Some governments financed top-secret mind control experiments. To the best of her knowledge they had made very little progress, but… Perhaps someone had made a major discovery and it had, in turn, leaked to a childish and unscrupulous vigilante.

Really, it was terribly aggravating. Many of the murderer’s victims were in jail for life because of L’s efforts. Did Kira really think L hadn’t done her job properly? Did Kira really think life in jail wasn’t punishment? There was a vast difference between choosing a life of solitude, and being forced to live it. 

L clicked on the button that allowed her to contact Watari. She practically slammed her fingers on the dashboard.

“Yes?” Watari’s calm voice quelled the sparks of L’s incipient anger.

“Do you remember Lind L. Tailor?” 

“The one who keeps saying he’ll do anything to commute his upcoming execution to a life sentence?” 

L smiled at the gray computer screen. “Yes, I think it’s time to offer him a deal.” 

It was time to speak to Kira directly.


End file.
